| The Honourable Gareth Evans AO, QC |
|
|---|---|
| Minister for Foreign Affairs | |
| In office 2 September 1988 – 11 March 1996 |
|
| Preceded by | Bill Hayden |
| Succeeded by | Alexander Downer |
| Senator for Victoria | |
| In office 1 July 1978 – 6 February 1996 |
|
| Succeeded by | Stephen Conroy |
| Member of the Australian Parliament for Holt |
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| In office 2 March 1996 – 30 September 1999 |
|
| Preceded by | Michael Duffy |
| Succeeded by | Anthony Byrne |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 5 September 1944 Melbourne |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Political party | Australian Labor Party |
| Spouse(s) | Merran Evans |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne |
| Occupation | Barrister |
Gareth John Evans, AO, QC (born 5 September 1944), is a former Australian politician from 1978 to 1999 representing the Australian Labor Party, serving in a number of ministries including Attorney-General and Foreign Minister from 1983 to 1996 in the Hawke and Keating governments. He was president and chief executive officer of the International Crisis Group from 2000 to 2009. Soon after, he was appointed an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne. In 2010, Evans was appointed Chancellor of the Australian National University.[1]
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Evans was born in Melbourne, Victoria, the son of a tram driver. He was educated at Melbourne High School; the University of Melbourne, where he graduated in arts and law; and Oxford University, where he took a Masters degree in philosophy, politics and economics.[2] In 2004, he became an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, his alma mater at Oxford.
He practised as a barrister in Melbourne, specialising in representing trade unions. From 1971 he was a lecturer and then a senior lecturer in constitutional law at Melbourne University, and was considered one of Australia's leading constitutional lawyers. In 1977 he edited Labor and the Constitution 1972–75, a collection of essays on constitutional issues during the Whitlam government.[3] He became a Queen's Counsel in 1983.[2]
Evans was active in the Australian Labor Party from his student days, and was an unsuccessful Labor candidate for the Senate in 1975. A member of the right-wing Labor Unity faction, he was a supporter of Bob Hawke's ambitions to lead the party after the fall of the Whitlam government. He was also a strong civil libertarian, and was vice-president of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty Victoria).[4]
In 1977 Evans was elected to the Senate and appointed to the Opposition front bench in 1980, becoming Shadow Attorney-General. He took an active part in the campaign to have Bill Hayden replaced as Labor leader. This happened shortly before the 1983 federal election, which Hawke won. Evans then became Attorney-General.
As Attorney-General, Evans undertook a large agenda for law reform on a range of issues. He immediately ran into controversy, however, by arranging for the Royal Australian Air Force to take surveillance photos of the Franklin Dam project in Tasmania, which the Hawke government was pledged to stop, over the objections of the Tasmanian Liberal government. The Hawke government was accused of misusing the RAAF for domestic political purposes. Evans's use of RAAF planes led to his earning the nickname "Biggles", after Captain W. E. Johns's fictional aviation hero.[5][6]
In December 1984, Hawke moved Evans to the less-sensitive portfolio of Resources and Energy. In 1987, he moved to Transport and Communications. He was appointed Foreign Minister in September 1988. He held the position for seven years and six months, implementing significant changes to Australia's foreign policy. The Hawke and Keating governments were committed to shifting emphasis from Australia's traditional relationships with the United States and the United Kingdom to increased involvement with Asian neighbours, particularly Indonesia and China. To this end, Evans travelled extensively within the region, developing relations with counterparts in most Asian countries.
Evans also helped with development of the UN plan for the rebuilding of Cambodia after the Vietnamese occupation; with negotiation of the International Chemical Weapons Convention; and with establishment of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). He also initiated the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, although little ultimately came of this project. In 1995 he received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for his Foreign Policy article "Cooperative Security and Intrastate Conflict".
On 6 December 1990, Evans infamously became the first Australian senator to say "fuck" in the Senate, when he interjected "for fuck's sake" during a speech by Senator Robert Hill.[7]
In 1991, during a political storm over Indonesian military violence in East Timor, in his capacity as Australia's foreign minister, Evans defended the Indonesian military junta's actions by describing the Dili massacre as 'an aberration, not an act of state policy'.[8][9] This was despite growing evidence (both within Australian intelligence and the international media) of increasingly violent Indonesian military efforts to protect and extend their business interests in East Timor—interests that included coffee plantations, marble mines and large oil contracts—by utilizing starvation, napalm, torture and death camps.[10][11][12][13][14] Oil contracts that Evans himself had co-signed with the Indonesian military junta that enabled Australian companies to share with the Suharto family in what would later be established as clearly East Timor's oil.
This connection was highlighted during an extensively publicised video recorded in a private jet over the Timor Sea. Senator Evans, replete with champagne[15] offered an astonishingly naive toast, characterising the Timor Sea oil contract as "... uniquely unique".[16] Later, in a coincidental occurrence, when carriers of a secretly-filmed video exposing the Dili massacre arrived in Australia, they were inexplicably strip-searched by customs officials. Fortunately, they had passed the massacre footage on to another carrier on the same flight, who brought it through customs unhindered.[17] Evans' diplomatic failures regarding East Timor were directly linked to his failures to procure senior positions in the United Nations, including his ill-fated attempt to become the Secretary-General.[18]
In 1993, as a member of the Keating government, Evans became Leader of the Government in the Senate. In this position, despite his heavy workload as Foreign Minister, he led the government's domestic legislative agenda in the upper house, where the government did not have a majority, and every bill had to be negotiated with the minor parties. He played a leading role in getting the government's native title bills through the Senate following the High Court of Australia's decision in Mabo v Queensland.
Evans was the 1995 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award[19] worth US$200,000 for improving world order, awarded by the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky.
Evans had long desired to move from the Senate to the House of Representatives, where he hoped to pursue his leadership ambitions. His first attempt to do so, in 1984, had been thwarted by the Socialist Left faction, but in 1996 he gained endorsement for the seat of Holt, in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, and was easily elected at the 1996 election.
During the Keating government, Gareth Evans was widely considered as a possible candidate for the High Court of Australia. Had he been appointed, he would have been the first politician appointed to the High Court since Lionel Murphy's appointment in 1975.[20] Although Evans sought appointment, his elevation to the Court was ultimately stymied.
The Keating government was defeated at the election, and Evans thus entered the House as an Opposition member. He was elected Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, defeating Simon Crean, and he was appointed Shadow Treasurer by Leader Kim Beazley.
During 1997 Evans orchestrated in secret the defection to the Labor Party of the leader of the Australian Democrats, Senator Cheryl Kernot, who resigned from the Senate in October and became a Labor House of Representatives candidate at the 1998 election. It later emerged that Evans had been having an affair with Kernot during the negotiations for her defection. (See details under Personal life, below.)
Labor's defeat at the 1998 election led to Evans's resignation from the opposition front bench, and in September 1999 he resigned from Parliament.
From January 2000 he was president and chief executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group,.[21] In 2000 and 2001, he co-chaired the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), appointed by the government of Canada. Citing high workload and burnout, he resigned in 2009.[22]
In 2001, Evans was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).[2] He was also a member of the UN Secretary-General's Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, whose report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, was published in December 2004.[2] He is a member of the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction sponsored by Sweden and chaired by Hans Blix, and of the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, chaired by Ernesto Zedillo.[2] He is an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network and serves on the International Editorial Board of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.[2]
Evans is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Global Panel Foundation.[23] In June 2008, the then Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, appointed him co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. In July 2008, he was selected as an inaugural fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. In October 2008, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of law by the University of Sydney.
Evans is also a member of Collegium International, an organisation of leaders with political, scientific, and ethical expertise whose goal is to provide new approaches in overcoming the obstacles in the way of a peaceful, socially just and an economically sustainable world.[24]
In July 2009, Evans participated at the United Nations General Assembly in an interactive dialogue on Responsibility To Protect (R2P).[25] On 11 August, he joined the University of Melbourne as an honorary professorial fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences.
Evans was appointed the Chancellor of the Australian National University effective 1 January 2010,[1] and was installed as Chancellor by Governor-General Quentin Bryce at a ceremony on 18 February 2010,[26] replacing Kim Beazley following his appointment as Ambassador to the United States.
With Francis Deng, in 2011 Gareth Evans was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.[27]
Evans is a Member of the GLF Global Leadership Foundation.
In 2009 Gareth Evans joined the project "Soldiers of Peace", a movie against all wars and for global peace.[28][29]
Evans is married to Professor Merran Evans, of Monash University, with whom he has two adult children.[2]
Evans conducted a protracted extramarital affair with fellow senator Cheryl Kernot in the 1990s. Kernot was the leader of the Democrats when she spectacularly defected to join the Australian Labor Party in 1997. While their affair was reportedly well-known within Canberra political circles, it was first made public in 2002 by Laurie Oakes in his The Bulletin column.[30]
Evans considers himself a humanist and was awarded the Australian Humanist of the Year Award in 1990 by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies.[2]
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Peter Durack |
Attorney-General of Australia 1983 – 1984 |
Succeeded by Lionel Bowen |
| Preceded by Peter Walsh |
Minister for Resources and Energy 1984 – 1987 |
Succeeded by Peter Morris as Minister for Resources |
| Succeeded by John Kerin as Minister for Primary Industry and Energy |
||
| Preceded by Peter Morris as Minister for Transport |
Minister for Transport and Communications 1987 – 1988 |
Succeeded by Ralph Willis |
| Preceded by Michael Duffy as Minister for Communications |
||
| Preceded by Bill Hayden |
Foreign Minister of Australia 1988 – 1996 |
Succeeded by Alexander Downer |
| Parliament of Australia | ||
| Preceded by Michael Duffy |
Member for Holt 1996 – 1999 |
Succeeded by Anthony Byrne |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by John Button |
Leader of the Australian Labor Party in the Senate 1993 – 1996 |
Succeeded by John Faulkner |
| Preceded by Kim Beazley |
Deputy Leader of the Australian Labor Party 1996 – 1998 |
Succeeded by Simon Crean |
| Business positions | ||
| Preceded by Alain Destexhe |
President of the International Crisis Group 2000 – 2009 |
Succeeded by Louise Arbour |
| Academic offices | ||
| Preceded by Kim Beazley |
Chancellor of Australian National University 2010 – present |
Incumbent |